


Twenty Fragments of Dream Designs

by matrixrefugee



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Drabbles, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-21
Updated: 2018-05-21
Packaged: 2019-05-09 16:50:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14719907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/matrixrefugee/pseuds/matrixrefugee
Summary: Originally written for the now defunct 20in20 drabble community on Livejournal - A collection of moments in the dreams and waking world of Dom Cobb and his team.





	Twenty Fragments of Dream Designs

"Earth"

One of Mal's signatures had been the unmistakable rich smell of earth. Even in the most sterile urban landscape, surrounded by glass and concrete towers, he smelled the dark, heady aroma of freshly turned ground, as if someone was puttering in a garden nearby. The scent was so distinctive that catching a whiff was enough to put Cobb's memories into a tailspin, if he happened to smell it in the waking world, and if he smelled it in a dream, it nearly made him panic.

Or at least it did until he noticed the very same scent lingered in Ariadne's designs. 

\-------------------------------------------------------------------

"Air"

Breathe, breathe, dammit. You might be dreaming, but that's still air you're breathing and you need it to keep your head clear, Dom. Don't start panting, don't start panicking. Not the time for this... keep trying numbers. There we go. Open the safe. Breathe. Take the plans, get out of here. Keep breathing, keep walking. Out the door, down the hall. Keep walking normally. Keep breathing. You're almost there.

Dammit, projections. Did they smell me down here? Shallow breaths now. Walk faster. Keep breathing. Hope they don't see you. Keep breathing, get out of their sight line. Find the damn exit.

\--------------------------------------------------------------------

"Fire"

The dream caught fire around him, but for once, Cobb wasn't responsible for it. He had smelled smoke as he was cracking open the wall safe where the subject had hidden the disk containing the program they were looking for, which compelled him to work faster. The rumble of the flames in the hallway threatened to drown out the chest-rumbling bass notes of the countdown. Cobb dashed into the hallway despite the flames chewing the walls.

He snapped awake, finding Eames kneeling over him.

"For God's sake, Eames, don't you ever hold your lighter under my ear to wake me up again!"

\---------------------------------------------------------------------

"Water"

Of all the kick techniques his team could use to wake him up, Cobb most hated being dunked. Bad enough that it caused a flood to appear out of nowhere and crash over him wherever he stood-- in a conference room, a hotel room, a bar --even worse was snapping suddenly awake while underwater in a bathtub, and then having to fight toward the surface while he was already disoriented and at times shaking from injuries caused by the dream falling to rubble around him, burying him alive as he drowned.

It felt as traumatic as being born all over again.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------

"Spirit"

Mal might, sadly or thankfully, have passed on, and now it was safe for him to build again without her shade interfering with his work or endangering his team. But her spirit lived on his designs. He saw flashes of her fondness for wood and natural designs in an interior he designed for an extraction which a hotel CEO hired him to run on an accountant suspected of embezzlement. He saw her cleverness in a maze he designed to keep the projections from finding the team quickly. And he felt the stability she once had, in the totem he carried.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------

"Airplane meals"

Mystery meat and vegetables with sickeningly bright colors: the nutritional equivalent of prefab construction. It was one reason, if a client offered his team the use of a corporate jet, that Cobb accepted it gratefully. The anonymity that it afforded was the main reason, but after years of flying coach, while he was getting his feet under himself, in this field which life and circumstances foisted on him, he took any chance he could get to avoid any irritating reminders of just what his work really entailed. He could maintain a veneer of respectability to mask the criminal he's become.

\-----------------------------------------------------------------------

"Sake"

Sake put Cobb in mind of Kyoto and the mess that the Cobol job devolved into. The slight burn that the rice wine left in his throat made him think of how Nash's carelessness had cost them the job and nearly sent them on the run again.

But its warmth reminded him of how, had it not been for that burn, Saito would not have been impressed with their work, impressed enough that he hired Cobb for what became the Fischer inception, with the promise of a clear path home to where he belonged, rather than wandering from job to job.

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"Sandwich "

Cobb insisted to the rest of the team that Ariadne wasn't the gopher. Her talent was never going to be squandered by treating her like an office girl.

That didn't stop the girl from doing him small courtesies, like bringing him a sandwich when he got so engrossed in a project that he forgot to stop for lunch.

"You didn't have to do that, Ariadne," he said, eying the BLT on his worktable.

"Actually, I did. You get mean when you don't eat. Then your designs get weird."

"Never seen that happen," he argued. But she gave him a Look that told him otherwise.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------

"A Cookie"

Sometimes Cobb could not help thinking that working with those two idiots, also known as Arthur and Eames, was good practice for dealing with the kind of silly arguments over nothing which kids got themselves into.

"This is what happens when you don't eat lunch when we're working, Eames."

"In my defense, Arthur, I was distracted and I simply forgot."

"And that's another sign: you're getting defensive."

"I am not."

"You just proved my position: you're getting snappish, and that tends to happen when you haven't eaten."

"Both of you, knock it off, I'm trying to work here. Eames, just be quiet and have a cookie."

\----------------------------------------------------------------------

"Salad"

Cobb would not exactly call himself a health nut, though since his work kept him on his back a good deal, he kept his diet as low calorie as possible. But he enjoyed making his own salads: slicing cucumbers and tomatoes, tearing lettuce and breaking apart onion slices, adding croutons and strips of grilled chicken. The creative process applied to something as simple and utilitarian as a meal.

"You sure you're not trying to make a pun based on your name, for dinner, darling?" Eames asked, watching him.

"All puns unintentional," Cobb replied, not looking up from adding the oil and vinegar.

\---------------------------------------------------------------------

Horror   
Pandora's box. The myth came back to Cobb, every time he unlatched the PASIV device and started setting it up for a dream sharing session. The box of wonders and horrors, of dreams for some and nightmares for others, including him. The box that brought the monsters out of the deep corners of his sub-conscious, bringing them right into the same space as the dreamers, where they could be attacked at will by the shade which he had tried to suppress.

And yet, thanks to Ariadne, he had found the hope that lay hidden deep at the bottom of the box.

\---------------------------------------------------------------------

"Humor"

Arthur and Eames were two of the best dream-sharers Cobb knew, but that expertise came at a price:

Enduring their near-constant jabs and their tendency to one-up the other. Granted, Eames did most of the one-upping, while Arthur calmly refused to play along, but that never discouraged Eames.

Occasionally, this friendly rivalry escalated into fraternity pranks. Eames created forgeries intended to get Arthur's goat, Arthur retaliated by sending projections to torment Eames. At least they reserved their antics for the design phase: during the actual job, they were as canny as two cats, which was why Cobb put up with their shenanigans.

\---------------------------------------------------------------------

"Hurt/comfort"

He found Ariadne as he should have expected her, aged, crouched beside a rock on an island covered in ruins, surrounded by heaving waves. Ariadne on Naxos, but he was no Theseus to abandon her.

"Thought you'd be busy down here," he said.

She shook her greying head. "I did, but it wasn't the same, not like it was with you, with Arthur and the others. She gazed at the crumbling Grecian structures unseeingly.

He took off his jacket, wrapping it around her bent shoulders, then unholstered his pistol. "Time we both woke up." And he held it out to her, stock first.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------

"Historical "

The job in Salem, Massachusetts reminded Cobb of a time when he would likely have been marked as a warlock and his team hanged or burned at the stake, rather than merely being arrested, tried and sent away to minimum security for mind-crime. These days mind-crime was hard to prove since the laws no longer recognized spectral evidence, or things seen in dreams as viable evidence. But back then, inception would have been easier to pull off, since people regarded things seen in dreams as the word of God or an angel, wise words that brooked no argument or resistance.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------

"Heroic "

Ariadne had once lead him through the labyrinth of his own mind, to face the monster at the heart of the maze. Now it was his turn to save her. The subject's projections had turned on her, the least trained of the team, the one with the least amount of experience. He and Arthur should have seen this coming and he kicked himself for it. But none of the team was going to be left behind if he could help it.

And so he descended into limbo to rescue the damsel who had once rescued him from his own self-created distress.

\---------------------------------------------------------------------

"Mirror"

One of the keys to working with a forger, particularly a trickster like Eames, was keeping a mirror at hand. Unfortunately, that meant that the design had to have a minimum of glassy surfaces (no small feat, given Cobb's taste for airy Bauhaus structures), since an especially observant subject might easily spot the forger's reflection and see past their mimicry. He had started carrying a pocket mirror with him, particularly during test runs, to make sure where his forger was at all times.

Sometimes he did this just to give Eames hell for the times he'd pranked the team.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------

"Minor"

Little things, seemingly minor details could make or break a job. Nash screwing up the carpet in Saito's love-nest wasn't the first time Cobb had seen things go south. He'd done a job when the subject realized he was dreaming because the color was off in the wallpaper. And he had, in a moment of carelessness, nearly munged his own first job because he'd neglected to add the carving on a banister. Some considered him a martinet for going over designs with the proverbial fine-tooth comb, but he'd rather fuss over detail than lose a job over a small thing.

\---------------------------------------------------------------------

"Mimic"

Checking the design one last time had always been a priority for Cobb, and with Mal out of his head, he could go back to designing.

He was checking the boundaries of the second level of the dream, the main concourse of a hotel, for a CEO tracking an accountant, when he heard footsteps behind him. Looking back, he spotted Mal, looking out over the parapet of the mezzanine. He started to back away, when out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a reflection on a darkened window.

"Eames, don't do that again: you almost gave me a heart attack."

\-----------------------------------------------------------------------

"Minute"

A minute in the waking world equaled an hour in the dream, but experience had taught Cobb that this expansion of time did not allow time for dawdling. That chest rumbling echo on the wind meant the kick was about to happen and he had only what equaled seconds to finish the extraction. Seconds to pick the lock on a safe, milli-seconds to cajole or threaten or shake a subject into giving up information. Micro-seconds to find the exit and brace for the dream collapsing.

But that minute to end the dream felt like an hour when the pain hit him.

\-----------------------------------------------------------------------

"Middle"

The middle of the night, a time when it wasn't unusual for Cobb to wake up. Work kept him asleep for hours at a time and that played hob with his circadian rhythms.

Thus it wasn't odd for him to sit up in the wee hours of the morning, working, writing or trying not to think about Mal. Her voice tended to come out of the dark corners of memory, so clear and vivid he had to reach for his totem to make she he wasn't dreaming,

Some nights he sat awake till the sky greyed with daybreak before he could sleep.


End file.
